JUBA, 19 June 2014 (IRIN) - Across a swath of South Sudan, fields where
green shoots should be poking through the wet soil lie untilled and
overgrown; herds of cattle that would sustain communities through the
lean season have been lost or stolen; food stores have been looted or
burned.

The people of South Sudan, the world’s youngest and one of its poorest
nations, are accustomed to hardship. But six months of war has uprooted
so many of them and destroyed their meagre livelihoods that some four
million require humanitarian assistance.

Relief workers scrambling to avert a famine report daunting obstacles:
from the failure of South Sudan’s feuding leaders to halt the conflict,
to near-impossible logistics and limited international attention and
resources.

“The biggest single obstacle is the absence of peace,” Toby Lanzer, the
top UN humanitarian official in South Sudan, told IRIN. “You still have a
lot of people on the move, the continuation at least of a threat of
violence breaking out at any stage.”

According to UN figures, about 1.5 million people have fled their homes
since December, when fighting broke out between supporters of President
Salva Kiir and those of his former deputy, Riek Machar. Thousands have
died in the violence, including many civilians brutally targeted because
of their ethnicity.

The failure of international pressure to stop the fighting before the
planting season has prompted increasingly loud warnings that starvation
could lead to far more deaths unless beleaguered civilians receive
urgent - and sustained - assistance.

A survey carried out in May by government agencies and food security
experts forecast that 3.9 million people, or one-third of South Sudan’s
population, would face ‘crisis’ or ‘emergency’ levels of food insecurity
by the end of August, up from 1.6 million a year earlier. ‘Crisis’ and
‘emergency’ represent levels three and four on the widely-used
Integrated Food Security Phase Categorization (IPC) scale.

Level five is “famine”, defined by the IPC
as “the absolute inaccessibility of food to an entire population or
sub-group of a population, potentially causing death in the short
term.” For a famine to be declared, several conditions have to be met,
notably a crude death rate of two per 10,000 people per day and a
general acute malnutrition rate greater than 30 percent.

In rural communities, families would normally store stocks of food to
see them through to the next harvest. But the displaced generally left
their supplies behind, and host communities have had to share with
relatives and strangers. Families have lost their livestock to theft,
either by rival communities or ill-fed fighters from either side.

In addition, traders who would bring foodstuffs from neighbouring
countries such as Uganda and Sudan and exchange it for local commodities
have been absent for months because of the fighting. Salt, for example,
is almost impossible to find in some areas, Lanzer said.

UNICEF, the UN Children’s Agency, said in April that the number of
children under five years of age suffering severe acute malnutrition
across South Sudan had reached 223,000, or double the total before the
crisis. It warned that 50,000 of them could die this year unless they
received assistance, such as therapeutic feeding.

Relief agencies identify the southern counties of Unity State and parts
of neighbouring Jonglei among the most critically affected areas of the
France-sized country.

In Unity’s Panyijar county, thousands of families from the surrounding
area have taken refuge on islands in vast marshlands west of the White
Nile River. Relief officials say many are subsisting on water lilies and
tree leaves – a traditional fall-back in lean times. World Food Program
airdrops have brought some relief, but aid workers say malnutrition
levels there are soaring.

Medical charity Medair said almost half of the 4,500 children it had
screened in Panyijar since April were malnourished. It found that
families were increasingly concentrating their meagre rations on their
strongest offspring.

“They want all their children to survive but they are worried that they
will lose them all,” Medair spokeswoman Wendy van Amerongen said.

Hopes of trucking food and other emergency supplies to isolated areas
before the rains made many roads impassable were dashed by continued
insecurity.

The government and opposition agreed in early May to observe a “month of
tranquillity” in order to allow civilians to go back home and sow their
land, and to let in more humanitarian aid. But fitful peace talks in
Addis Ababa have made little progress, violence has continued, and there
have been few reports of civilians returning home in significant
numbers.

“There’s a lot of tension. Places like Bentiu (the capital of Unity
State) are really on a knife-edge. Anything can happen there, and it’s
not the only location,” Mike Sackett, the acting country director for
WFP in South Sudan, told IRIN.

Where WFP did manage to pre-position food before the rains, much of it
has been looted by armed factions or hungry civilians. In May, three
warehouses in Upper Nile State were emptied after the areas where they
were located changed hands during the fighting, Sackett said.

With most main roads impassable, WFP has had to focus on airlifting and
airdropping supplies, mostly using huge Russian-built Ilyushin cargo
planes.

To make sure the rations reached the most needy, and help prevent aid
being seized by combatants, Sackett said WFP was inserting small
“hit-and-run” teams into crisis zones for little more than a week to
assess requirements, register those in need, and oversee the airdrops
and the distribution. Other partners were vaccinating children and
distributing seeds at the same time.

He said WFP enjoyed considerable goodwill from the two warring parties -
a legacy of its massive aid operation in the 1990s during Sudan’s long
civil war – and that this helped keep its aircraft and ground teams
safe.

However, Sackett said his agency simply doesn’t have enough food to meet the needs.

Donors including the United States and United Kingdom pledged an extra
US$600 million at a May conference in the Norwegian capital, Oslo.
However, the UN says it is still US$800 million short of what is needed
for this year alone. Sackett said it was still unclear how much of the
new money would be allocated to WFP.

“Even post-Oslo, we really haven’t seen any surge of new confirmed pledges that we can translate into physical food,” he said.

Plans to distribute 17,000 tons of food in June, for instance, were
probably not possible because of a “constrained pipeline,” he said. “We
are overcoming the logistic constraints by more and more aircraft, but
we don’t have the food to get up to the plan.”

The humanitarian effort has faced bureaucratic hurdles.

Lanzer said UN officials spent weeks persuading the government to remove
dozens of checkpoints along the few main roads still open. Unofficial
taxes were adding 4,500 Sudanese pounds (US$1,200) to the cost of
delivering a truckload of supplies. The UN also persuaded the government
to streamline customs and immigration procedures for aid workers and
relief goods.

The environment brings other challenges. In Bentiu and Panyijar, planes
have been unable to land after rain because the airstrip becomes too
boggy. The UN is negotiating with oil companies to get access to an
all-weather strip north of Bentiu. Still, UN agencies have reached over
80 locations in the past six months, mostly by air.

The cost and limited capacity of even the largest aircraft means WFP is
looking to send food barges up the White Nile, despite the hazards.

In April, unidentified attackers fired guns and rocket-propelled
grenades at barges carrying food and fuel to a UN base in Malakal,
another tense northern town, injuring four crew members and UN
peacekeepers.

Lanzer said it was difficult to persuade barge operators to try again.
But by early June, workers in Juba were loading food onto a convoy of
barges that will have to cover the same route through both government
and opposition controlled territory. WFP officials were already
negotiating with local power-brokers to try to ensure their safe
passage.

“They are also passing through areas where people are probably pretty hungry … so there are three main threats,” Sackett said.

For civilians, the rainy season brings some respite. With richer
grazing, cattle produce more milk, while wild foods and fish can be more
plentiful. Moreover, the first so-called ‘green’ harvest comes in
September, ahead of the main crop in November.

But yields are expected to be meagre in the north and east, where the
fighting has primarily raged. Once those crops are used up, the food
crisis is expected to intensify.

“From the end of this year, we will be plunging into a long lean season
that will go right up to the September 2015 harvest,” Sackett said. “The
likelihood of problems is certainly greater this time next year than it
is now.”

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